In December, Java was more popular than .Net for building Web services, according to a ZDNet UK poll, but weeks later the position had dramatically reversed; investigation revealed just what (dubious) lengths Microsoft will go to to promote its products and manipulate the public opinion.
Microsoft Rigs .Net-Related Voting Poll
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I look foward to Microsoft’s response 😉
This is hilarious! It’s like some bad movie
Of course, Be did the same thing, and even wrote a Be newsletter article on how to write ballot-stuffers 🙂
But that’s OK because Be is good and Microsoft is evil, right?
I don’t even want to see if slashdot picked this up too.
of the time Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf was voted People Magazine’s most beautiful person of 1998 through a web poll. He died, btw.
Think I’m gonna write me a .net app now. One that votes for java.
uh… is any one actually surprised by this?
I heard about it first on Slashdot.
Most folks I showed it to act as if it’s to be expected. No one I’ve showed it to seem disturbed by the utter lack of moral direction shown by this company. This is the same Microsoft that wants to manage all your personal information in XP and thinks they should be trusted to police themselves.
Of course, Microsoft will tell us that this was the work of individuals within the company and that they do NOT condone this kind of stuff. Naturally.
Most people got used to Microsoft’s ‘utter lack of moral direction’ a long time ago….
But that doesn’t mean that Microsoft should go on doing as they please.
Many companies do things like this. It is not unique to MS.
“Many companies do things like this. It is not unique to MS.”
And even if it was, I guess we should all drop Windows and switch to Linux, right ?
No, we should all become lumberjacks and abandon this evil digital technology.
Go outside, hug a tree, smell a flower, kill something – you know you want to
Give it a break. There is NO conspiracy here. Some internal person with an excess of zeal forwarded an email to a bunch of silly people who decided to vote for a product they believe in, without considering what they were doing. Chances are that the MS people who voted in this poll thought that *millions* of other people were voting in it too from all around the world, and just wanted to do their part to stand up for .NET.
Of course who are you to say that EVERY ONE of the MS employees who participated in this poll will NOT write a .NET service this year??
Anyway, obviously the question was geared towards industry consumers of these technologies, and not meant to be answered by the producers of the technology. The MS folks who answered this poll should have thought of the fact that they were skewing the results, but they didn’t. They didn’t for the same reason that the same people open an email that they just got 15 times from 15 different people, and don’t realize it was a virus. The particular individuals who did this were just not thinking about the impact such a large group of voters would make.
Let me make it clear again that there is no consipiracy here. Those of you who believe there is obviously have no idea what kind of response *any* 1st year MS employee could get just by sending that email to all full time MS employees (yes, we have an email alias for that).
As for the idiot that tried to vote >200x for the same service, do you believe that someone didn’t try the same thing for Java? Just because it wasn’t mentioned in the article doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Anyway, I’m disappointed that the numbers got messed up, because I would have liked to see an accurate representation.
For what it’s worth, .NET is much better technology than the JRE. It runs the *same code* ~10x faster than the JRE (yes, there is going to be a Java->.NET compiler, developed by a 3rd party). Why NOT recompile your existing Java code? JSP is buggy as hell and slow to boot. .NET is a much better platform, as I’m sure you’ll all agree once you’ve had a chance to bang away on it for a while.
[For those of you who don’t read OSNews regularly, I work at Microsoft.]
As always, the above is my personal view, and not in any way an official position.
No, we should all become lumberjacks and abandon this evil digital technology.
I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK.
I sleep all night and I work all day. — Monte Python
I cut down trees,
I skip and jump,
I go to the lava-tree
Give it a break. There is NO conspiracy here
YOU say that and thats wrong, because is is conspiracy. From Microsoft, or from employees. I don’t care. And people who work for them accept the political goals of MS (domination, destroying other software even by illegal means), so there’s very little difference. And they ARE responsible for what they do.
Of course who are you to say that EVERY ONE of the MS employees who participated in this poll will NOT write a .NET service this year??
Most Microsoft people say these kind of things (about any MS abusive action). “Oh we found a poll, we just voted”. The goal was just to provide false figures. That’s propaganda. (and that’s how MS sells software).
For what it’s worth, .NET is much better technology than the JRE. It runs the *same code* ~10x faster than the JRE
No. People know what to think of benchmarks about vaporeware.
Why NOT recompile your existing Java code? JSP is buggy as hell and slow to boot. .NET is a much better platform, as I’m sure you’ll all agree once you’ve had a chance to bang away on it for a while.
Luckily, lots of people still don’t want to be enslaved.
And hearing Microsoft people saying “buggy” about other software is always funny. (“honnest” works the same). Thanks for the laughs.
No. People know what to think of benchmarks about vaporeware.
I’m not talking about vaporware <sp> or benchmarks. I’m citing my own real world experience both with Java programming and C# in .NET. .NET is better, and for you to claim it isn’t without having seen it first is ludicrous.
I’m citing my own real world experience both with Java programming and C# in .NET. .NET is better, and for you to claim it isn’t without having seen it first is ludicrous.
You *don’t* have seen it : you’re comparing a “future” C# to a “past” Java. YOU haven’t experienced future Java programming. This is a traditionnal Microsoft method : saying “hey look at our cool features in our future OS”, while comparing to years-old versions of competitors. Claiming Java will be the exactly the same (strictly no improvement) the day .NET is available/usable to everyone is just traditionnal Microsoft FUD.
You tell me which is faster then.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/VisualStudioNET/Trial/2/W982… http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/“>Java2
Oh sorry I thought you knew the meaning of the word “beta”. I’m absolutely sorry.
It runs the *same code* ~10x faster than the JRE (yes, there is going to be a Java->.NET compiler, developed by a 3rd party). <p>
Please post some C# and equivalent Java code, so we can verify your benchmarks.